Four centuries on, it is indisputable: the genius of Shakespeare will never be matched
Four-hundred years ago this week, two actors carried out the greatest act of literary salvage in history. Without them, our language would be poorer, our imagination more limited, our very sense of our selves “cabin’d, cribbed, confin’d”.
In November 1623, when Shakespeare had been dead for seven-and-a-half years, his former theatrical colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell gathered whatever material they could lay their hands on – copies of plays held by their troupe, prompt books, notes by the playwright himself, and, one assumes, their own recollections – and published them as a complete record of his dramatic works.
They called their collection “Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies”; but the world knows it as the “First Folio”.
It contained 36 of his 38 plays (39 if we count Edward III). Half of them had already been produced in quarto form – that is, printed on large sheets of paper that had been folded and refolded into eight-page booklets, though often with corrupted text. But no fewer than 18 were, as far as we can tell, published for the first time, including Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, and The Winter’s Tale.
How can we begin to compute what we would have lost without those 36 plays? Consider the phrases that have entered everyday speech from them: “brave new world”; “love is blind”; “salad days”; “strange bedfellows”; “at one fell swoop”; “faint-hearted”; “for goodness’ sake”; “rhyme nor reason”; “sea-change”; “too much of a good thing”.
Or consider the individual words that make their first appearance in that publication: “eyeball”; “bedazzled”; “sanctimonious”; “gloomy”; and countless others – including, come to think of it, “countless”.
Consider, above all, the characters, inexhaustible and archetypal, whom we have come to know better than our flesh-and-blood friends. No First Folio, no scheming Lady Macbeth, no moony Orsino, no vainglorious Brutus. Cleopatra, the first It Girl, forerunner to every Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian for whom fame is accomplishment enough, would exist only as a historical figure. No squeaking Cleopatra would boy her greatness i’ th’ posture of a whore.
Heminges and Condell preserved our civilisation just as surely as those Irish monks at the uttermost rim of the world who painstakingly copied out their texts while Europe descended into the Dark Ages.
While techbros cast doubt on his credentials, authors defer in awestruck wonder. They are surely right to do so
Of perhaps 750 First Folios, 235 are still with us, gorgeously bound and tended to like relics. Some are in private collections, some in universities, 82 are in the Folger Shakespeare Library, on Capitol Hill in Washington DC.
They are both valued and valuable. My old Oxford college, Oriel, was reported to have made a cool
£3½ million when it sold its copy to Sir Paul Getty, 20 years ago – which sounds impressive until you hear that, during the lockdown, Christie’s auctioned a copy from a small college in California for a smidgen under $10 million (£8 million) – one of the most expensive pieces of literature ever sold.
Why do people pay such sums? It is assuredly not for the quality of the original printing. Behind the grand leather covers, reverently added by Victorian enthusiasts, most First Folios look cheap. They contain typesetting errors and dodgy spelling, and sometimes contradict one another in ways that materially alter the meaning of the drama. Remarkably, no two are identical.
Even the frontispiece – the image of a balding man with wisps of hair around his lips, which is what we think of when we think of Shakespeare – is poorly executed, the head not seeming to connect with the shoulders. But, as so often with Shakespeare, that engraving by Martin Droeshout is all we have to go on. Those mismatched eyes resting indifferently upon us, drawn seven years after their subject had died, are the closest we get to an image of the greatest intellect our species has produced.
We are so accustomed to Shakespeare’s pre-eminence that we can lose sight of how bizarre it is. Some refuse on principle to accept it. Listen, for example, to Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency billionaire convicted of fraud earlier this month:
“When Shakespeare wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate – probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favourable.”
We are conditioned, thinks Bankman-Fried, to look upon the canonical authors with false nostalgia (“Bayesian priors” roughly means “your best statistical guess before you have gathered the full data”). Then again, he admits to disliking books.
Most authors, on the other hand, have deferred in a kind of awestruck wonder to the man Tom Stoppard calls “The Champ”. Dr Johnson wrote that we owe Shakespeare “every thing”. Jorge Luis Borges went so far as to compose a short story in which God acknowledged Shakespeare as His equal, a creator of worlds. As Robert Graves once deliciously put it, “The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.”
Shakespeare’s genius did not lie in original plot lines. On the contrary, the stories of his plays, with the sole exception, so far as I can work out, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, are lifted from somewhere else.
His language, though, is both inimitable and unsurpassable. I was leafing through Henry V last week in advance of a lecture, and kept choking up at lines that, though incidental to the action and not part of any grand speeches, were perfect pieces of poetry: “unwind your bloody flag”; “The sun doth gild our armour; up, my lords!”; “You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate”.
Even if some AI could imitate that style – and AI has, after all, mimicked Bach’s chorale cantatas to the point that some experts cannot tell the difference – I don’t believe it could give us his inexhaustible characters.
Sticking with Henry V, consider the nature of the king, a hero and a bully, “as remorseless and undistinguished as some natural force” in WB Yeats’s words, a man who, in his prayers, ends up ordering God to back him. Shakespeare’s creation is, in every sense, more vivid, more intriguing and, yes, more real, than the historical figure on whom he is based.
This is part of what Harold Bloom was getting at when he argued that Shakespeare invented human beings. He gave us the tools and the vocabulary to explore our inner natures. One consequence, which you’ll recognise if you know the plays, is the uncanny way in which he always seems to be on your level, speaking directly to you. To Tories he is a Tory, to radicals a radical, to cynics a cynic.
Chesterton was convinced that Shakespeare was a Catholic, Schlegel that he was a German – ganz unser (“entirely ours”). Maya Angelou has
How can we begin to compute what we would have lost without those 36 plays in the First Folio?
Shakespeare’s Henry V is more vivid, more intriguing and more real than the historical figure
written movingly of encountering Shakespeare when she was a child, and feeling at once “convinced that he was a little black girl”.
How does it work, this sorcery? How can the same line speak to different people in opposite ways? Or, indeed, to the same person in opposite ways at different times of life? Keats called it Shakespeare’s “negative capability”, and I am not sure anyone has ever properly explained it.
Part of it, perhaps, stems from the fact that we know so little about the man himself. We have, thanks to Heminges and Condell, nearly a million words by the man, but hardly any about him. We are thus free to infer what we will from his plays. And we find, in doing so, that the plays bring more to our experiences than our experiences to the plays.
What did Shakespeare himself believe? Was he a Catholic, a Protestant or an atheist? Did he prefer the absolute monarchy depicted in his English histories or the republican virtue of his Roman plays? Even if some new piece of evidence definitively pinned down his beliefs, it would make no difference to the universe he created.
How was Shakespeare possible? I have given up asking. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.